Serious Microhydro: Water Power Solutions from the Experts

Not the book I was looking for, but it is very interesting. This book is about whole systems and how other people who live out in the middle of no where got it done and the benefits they received.

I stopped reading this book at about page 200. I found it a disappointment. It's basically a collection of reprinted articles from Home Power, mostly from the 1990s. I'm a fairly intelligent fellow living in the Ozarks so I already had a pretty good common sense idea of how hydroelectric works, after all I have seen a few commercial power plant dams at our local lakes. What I didn't know was some of the terminology of the field directly relating to the turbines and generators, I have a strong electronic background already. I was looking for some relevant data such as brands, companies, and contacts. What this book offers in this area can be found by searching the back of the book, and that info is from the 1990s. Yes, the 1990s. While water, gravity, and electromagnetism haven't changed since then, electronics have and make no mistake, an alternative energy system isn't squat without electronics.While all the stories are inspiring, that's about all they are. (Maybe that's all they were supposed to be.)This book contains a lot of dry info reciting brands and models of equipment, boxes, panels, controllers, inverters, batteries, and turbines etc., that were available at the time the story writer built his or her system.As to the money, you need lots. Whether it's worth it or not is up to the souls involved and what it is they want from microhydro. If you want to feel good about your energy source, your personal microhydro plant would undoubtedly help you sleep better. The real cost savings would happen ONLY IF you're building your castle on land that is well, a mile or more, off of the beaten path away from existing utilities. Then a properly designed system could rock, assuming the "global warming" farce doesn't leave your locale drought stricken.The book could have made more use of good photography (color, not black and white), diagrams, as well as more definitions. AND LESS ACRONYMS! Why acronyms, you had plenty of pages to fill? Lose the lists of what appliances the folks have to use in their homes if word space is/was tight with the publisher.However, a plus is the continual usage of a couple of brand names, Trace inverters and Trojan batteries, as well as the name Don Harris, which leads me to believe that these are the brands and the person to use should you actually have the money to do this, and should they and he still be in business. After all, it's been nearly twenty years since most of this information was current.As I said, a disappointment.

ok

The great majority of this book is reprints from HomePower Magazine. I wish I had known this prior to purchasing the book. I already had a collection of the nearly all the articles from my multi year subscription deal HomePower offers. The photos in the magazines are more inclusive, often in color, and higher detail. Still, for someone with little knowledge of micro hydro this is a good cross section of a lot of the information out there and a useful collection to have in one bundle.

very interesting with a lot of case histories

I purchased and prepaid for this book from Amazon almost a year before it was available (the release date kept being postponed). I already owned "Microhydro-Clean Power from Water", Scott Davis' other book, which is an excellent introduction to the subject. The system I am installing on my land requires a very long transmission line, a subject Scott touches on in his first book, but not in great detail. For a year, I anxiously waited for this "Serious" microhydro book to come out, expecting it to contain the latest, up-to-the-minute developments in microhydro technology, including more detailed info pertaining to sites where the end use is far from the point of power generation. When this book finally arrived, it was almost completely a compilation of old articles from "Home Power" Magazine! Many of these articles are at least 20 years old! And I've been a subscriber of "Home Power" for over 10 years! So the only new information for me, was really OLD information! Nowhere is this book described as merely a compilation of old articles. "OLD Microhydro" would be a much more accurate title. And why it took a year for this to finally come out is beyond me. Did it take that long to get permissions for the reprints? Were some of the authors DEAD!???

We live off-the-grid and I consider myself fairly proficient w/ technology. For a new book this size printed within the past year, I expected modern examples, modern electorics, but almost every case study is just a reprint of a Home Power article from the 80's or 90's. Many of the manufacturers from then don't even exist anymore. Not very useful when you're designing a new system. I was looking for lots of examples of intakes, innovative screening, modern electronics (like using hydro mode w/ new MPPT charge controllers such as Midnight Solar Classic 250). Not in this book.I was anticipating at least lots of system schematics, but the color coded diagrams & charts reprinted from Home Power are very difficult to follow because the book is entirely in black and white.There's some good info at the end of the book at least.

Provides practical breakdowns of small to large existing systems, really helpful to those looking to build a system.